Google's In-House 'Neurographer' Creates Art from Algorithms

The Google offices are famous for bringing in some uncommon in-house staff like chefs and interior designers, but Mario Klingemann, the company's in-house 'neurographer,' is among the strangest of those Silicon Valley tech workers. Klingemann is tasked with using Google's world-leading neural networks to create artwork, deciding on the networks' input and curating the best results.

The neologistic neurographer's biggest project to date has been designing a site that draws connections between works from throughout the history of art around the world. Titled 'X Degrees of Separation,' the website has a collection of artworks from different eras and locations, and users are invited to select two. No matter how different they might seem, the program uses other visually similar pieces to draw a connection between them based on appearance — even for two works as varied as a 233,000 year old sculpture and a contemporary photograph.